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Comment by rewmie | Hacker News Reader

A startup lives and dies by the engineers. Without them there is no product. This very case documents how engineers created value only to get new arrivals whose net contribution is non-positive, to the point they effectively drive out the talent that made everything possible.

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No, a startup lives and dies by revenue or fundraising. Engineers are a means of achieving revenue for many startups, but that does not mean they live and die by their engineers. There are plenty of large companies that got there without engineering excellence.

If you really want an adventure into this 'engineers vs. funding', look up Roberts Space Industries.

Is that really a representative example though? Roberts basically invented a gaming subgenre despite himself until he had so much money there was no one left who could say "stop, that's enough". His ambition appears to keep engineers busy with an ever growing product scope.

That’s… an over simplification. But it’s an example of what happens when sales people are trying to sell jpegs and mpegs before anyone has done any development. It drives development to the point that virtually nothing is “done” and everything is half-done.

And conversely there are plenty of startups (the majority even) that had excellent engineering but failed due to a myriad of other reasons. "Engineering = success" is a very naive view of the industry and the world.

> And conversely there are plenty of startups (the majority even) that had excellent engineering but failed due to a myriad of other reasons. "Engineering = success" is a very naive view of the industry and the world.

You're putting up lame strawmen. No one claimed "Engineering = success".

The claim is that it is absolutely impossible to have a tech startup without engineers, and no idea, no matter how cunning it might be, can have success if engineering can't turn it to into reality.

A tech startup without engineering is snake oil. Simple as that. Let's not pretend that a salesperson parachuting into a startup with a product in the market can possibly have a comparable impact to those who actually deliver the actual product.

What good is a product to a startup if no one's using it? Sales turns the product into money.

Theranos did well for a while /s (but matches that narrative!)

I'm sorry, but that's kinda of nonsense.

You can build a fairly successful startup with little to no engineering.

Sure, engineers are usually pretty important (they're great at automating tasks to improve efficeincy)... but so are many other roles.

You can, but then you generally do not try to build a first in class telephony service.

How wrong can someone be? Unless the startups core proposition is some advanced algorithm (like openai), something very hard to replicate, it absolutely does not matter how great their engineers are. They merely need to be barely competent. Of course, better engineers means more efficiency and a different structure but that never fails a startup. Bad growth does. But growth numbers expected of VC backed startups can fail it. Thus the factors that fail or succeed most startups is not the engineeers.

You can say the same thing about marketing. If there's no marketing, who buys the product.

I guess these are engineers who somehow don't need to draw a wage then?

I was an engineer for 15 years and have been a tech presales for 4 years now. You couldn't be more wrong.

Best engineers making the best product ever will not make a dollar without good sales people and marketing and product managers and VC and ... You need ALL of these to make a succesful company.

This has been my experience as well. Some word of mouth counterexamples exist yet are not the norm.

I think it's especially hard to appreciate sales+marketing since they seem so ephemeral while tech is concrete. Sadly there also also too many examples of marketing getting too far ahead of the product, over promising, or devaluing engineering.

Best is definitely a balance, where all sides respect others' work and can see both the effort and its benefits.

Marketing/sales is fine. As long as they sell what we have, not a pie in the sky that we might at some point in the future have.

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